Jensen Huang was great.
The name of the company he runs, Nvidia, is a play on the Latin word for envy. But when asked last month, Juan couldn't think of a single thing he was jealous of. “I have a great life,” he said toward the end of the 75-minute interview with TIME magazine, before listing the things he's grateful for: his happy marriage, his adult children and his two dogs, who were given the all clear by ultrasound earlier that day.
Then, of course, there was his professional life: running the most valuable company in the world, worth about $4.3 trillion. “We are creating the most powerful technology the world has ever known,” Huang said, referring to the chips at the heart of the artificial intelligence revolution. “It would be a dream for anyone.”
It's no surprise that the eighth richest man in the world is enjoying life, but Juan may have had a special reason for this. So happy when we sat down to TIME's 2025 at the end of November Man of the Year story. A year-long friendship with President Trump blossomed and, more importantly, began to pay dividends. After years of being hit by U.S. export controls that prevented his chips from reaching the lucrative markets of China, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, it looked like Trump was going to give Huang exactly what he wanted.
This became clear just three days before our interview, when Huang met with Trump and Saudi Crown Prince Mohamed bin Salman (MBS) in Washington. Following those meetings, the US government announced that tens of thousands of Nvidia chips ordered by Saudi Arabia and the Emirates but delayed for months over national security concerns that they could end up in China would be released. During the visit, MBS charmed Huang by talking about the dozens of NVIDIA-based gaming PCs he keeps in his Riyadh palace and told the Nvidia CEO that he was “grateful for everything we did to help him” obtain export licenses, Huang said. “He was just very, very happy.”
There were also signs that Huang's affairs in China were finally improving.
Back in 2022, the Biden administration imposed significant restrictions on what chips US companies could export to China, believing that limiting Beijing's access to the best chips would help the US win the AI race. When Trump returned to office, despite his techno-accelerationist agenda, it was unclear whether he would roll back those restrictions, which were based on those he developed in his first term. Indeed, at one point this year, Trump appeared to be considering strengthening control of chip exports. Chinese frustration led Beijing to ban Nvidia chips entirely this summer, prompting the company to publicly announce that its revenue in China had dropped to $0. Juan was unhappy.
But behind the scenes, Nvidia lobbied the Trump administration with a compelling argument: export controls are counterproductive. They only encouraged China, so the argument went, to accelerate its efforts to create its own chips, thereby opening the door to a world where American technology would no longer dominate, posing a huge threat to US national security. From this perspective, Nvidia's sale of its own chips to China was a way to reduce the viability of these Chinese efforts and thus benefit US national security while opening up a market worth tens of billions of tax dollars. “We want America to be the richest country so we can fund the most powerful army,” Juan told me. “I think this is our way of contributing to national security.”
The argument seemed to have broken through (despite protests from many in the national security community who say export controls are working fine). On the morning of our interview, press reports emerged that Trump was considering allowing the export of Nvidia H200 chips to China—a significant victory for Huang and his company. These are the most powerful chips from Nvidia's latest “Hopper” generation, and are significantly better than the best chip that could be legally exported to China under previous rules (though still less powerful than the Blackwell chips Nvidia currently sells to US customers). Just before TIME magazine's Person of the Year story was published, recognizing Huang and other “artificial intelligence architects” as the year's biggest influencers, the US government confirmed that rumors of loosening export controls had indeed taken place. Juan won.
At the end of our interview, Juan leaned back in his chair and continued counting the things he was grateful for. He and his wife were planning to spend the weekend in San Francisco, he said, cooking their own meals and perhaps going out to look for a good French dip. But one could assume that the real reason for Juan’s cordiality lies elsewhere. “I have a simple life and I like it,” he said, smiling. “I can’t imagine a more perfect life.”
